This award will support travel, and related expenses for fifteen U.S. scientists and five U.S. pre- and post-doctoral trainees to attend and participate in the "Third International Workshop on Iron and Copper Homeostasis", to be held in Puc"n, Chile, November 10-14, 2004 and two additional workshops at biennial intervals. The trainees will be full participants and present posters on their work. Also attending, but not included in this proposal for funds, is a similar number of foreign scientists, from Latin America, Europe, Canada, Israel, Australia and Japan and a larger number of foreign pre- and post-doctoral students. The workshop organizers are Dr. Michael Garrick, Professor of Biochemistry, State University of New York at Buffalo and Dr. Marco T. Nu$ez, Professor in Cell Biology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Chile. We now extend the objective of the first two workshops to interactions with other metals, and to continue to strengthen international scientific collaboration in research on iron and copper metabolism and to stimulate the interest of young scientists and students in an area highly relevant to the understanding of toxicology, health and disease states. The attendance of leading scientists in the field of iron and of copper metabolism, expanded now to selected other metals plus representatives from outstanding Latin American laboratories has already led to and will likely continue to lead to closer integration efforts. This Workshop follows the First and Second International Workshops on Iron and Copper Homeostasis held in Puc"n, Chile, November 1999 and 2001. Each workshop was attended by U.S. scientists, scientists from Israel, Japan, Europe, Canada, Australia and Chile and increasing (from first to second) numbers of graduate and postgraduate students including two from the United States. A network of scientific collaboration began to develop after the First Workshop. Remarkably the Second Workshop extended this network despite being held shortly after September 11,2001. The organizers face a demand for a continuation and series. Clearly one can expect the third - fifth conferences to extend the success of the previous two to more scientists and trainees and more interacting metals